Asklemmy

I'm gen X. I definitely feel that Boomers are from a different world. I felt we got a shit deal but that just got worse for millenials then gen Z. To me, I feel like I can relate to generations that followed me. They're pissed off and they should be.

I hate these generational divides. Are we really supposed to think that a person from 1982 and a person from 1994 (both millennials) have more in common than a person from 1994 and one from 1997 (one millennial and one zoomer)? It makes no sense.

If I had to answer, I guess the closest would be Zillenial: born around the mid 90s.

Young millennial. And yeah, I think it’s not the most stark and clear cut, but older millennials had hope once it was just dashed upon adulthood, gen z grew up with everyone getting that they were hopeless. Us young millennials though, it was awkward as a 13 year old trying to explain to my parents that I was doomed.

But I definitely have more in common with someone a few years younger than me than several years older

I'm early Gen Z with a kinda poor family. So I had CRT's and old VHS but also grew up on the internet.

I feel an extreme gap between me and people a few years younger. I graduated in 2018 so I was some of the last people to have a traditional highschool experience. Before Covid, Zoom, and Chatgpt.

I also mostly grew up with computers instead of phones so Im only just now getting into TikTok, I'll likely never truly revolve around it like many others (both older and younger than me).

Generation labels are BS.

At some point, a clever media article increments the previous letter, or since everything was not planned well from the beginning and the letters have run out, stamps a poorly conceived label on a group of people.

These 'generations' are based on ambiguous date cutoffs, are engineered retroactively, and don't really align with any actual zeitgeist of a period. Because discrete vs continuous and other reasons. But any good scapegoat requires a convenient label.

Begun, the generation wars have.

The older generation is blamed for the world's problems since they were 'in charge'. The younger generation is blamed for being impulsive or wild, just not working hard enough, and maybe having too little respect. Also toast wrecks the economy or something?

The older generation is perplexed by the fracas since the people who were actually in power were supposed to be taking care of the big problems, while they were working a job, raising kids, and hoping to retire some day. They had no direct power and could not make decisions of a magnitude that would change much of anything in society.

The younger generation is equally perplexed because they have little money, status, or power, and are also working a job or three, waiting to start a family perhaps, and have often given up on retiring someday.

Everyone has been fed a steady diet of fabricated hopelessness, dysfunction, and outrage from the media for decades.

Only a few will realize the whole 'generation' thing is fabricated to keep you distracted. Who benefits from the scapegoating, infighting, and status quo? Someone is driving it, and benefiting from it, but it is not you.

Vote dammit

Old Millennial.

I grew up without cell phones or Internet until my teen years. Remember watching the OJ trial whenever I was home sick from school.

We were really worried about Y2K, which would have been a disaster if not fixed ahead of time.

Had to work on 9/11, and remember what airports were like before all the added security.

Also had to work - pushing groceries to people's cars while the VA sniper was rolling around the area shooting people in parking lots.

I remember people smoking cigarettes fucking everywhere. There were cigarette vending machines.

Our 2 and 3 liter bottles had an extra plastic piece to make the bottom flat. I don't think they were making them with feet like they do today. The bottoms were round, requiring a plastic shoe to create a flat bottom. Sometimes the bottles had a metal cap.

Hardly anybody wore seatbelts. Gas was under $1/gallon when I started driving.

'93, younger end of millennial.

Not big on generation labels though, they feel like a failed experiment. People are born every day of every year and our experiences overlap in a gradient. They don't separate into distinct portions.

The baby boom was an actual phenomenon, but every label afterwards feels arbitrary.

Millennial here. My impression is we're the largest generation on this platform, but I could be wrong.

Gen Z.

This place is a lot older than I expected.

Internet generation, progenitors of current online brainrot. Came too early to experience the 90s in all its glory, and too late for running console-quality games on a 6mm thick mobile device.

At least we have the 2010s to claim for ourselves. Those were pretty cool.

Generation Tamagotchi

Well I have kids your age, so a literal generation gap? Yes.

I think Lemmy has age diversity, more so than other platforms.

If you ask me, these generation labels are bullshit and just a way to put people into a stereotypical box and make them an "other". Not much better than astrology.

As Millennial as Millennial can be, smack dab in the middle of the cohort.

Geriatric millennial checking in from 1983.

I like the "Oregon Trail generation" name someone mentioned earlier too, I might lean into that one more in the future. Remember playing Math Blaster on an Apple Mac Classic in elementary school computer lab? Then you were there too!

Elder millennial here. Born in 1985.

The millennials watched several thousand people die on live television when we were kids and then everything went downhill from there. I was in high school in September 2001. Old enough to just barely understand what was happening, too young to do jack shit about it. Frightened, we looked to guidance from our Gen-X and Boomer teachers and elders. They told us to sit down, shut up, do as we were told, and everything would be fine. By and large, we did. By and large, nothing, not one fucking thing, ended up fine.

I say this to illustrate that this is why, and how, we are the DOOMER generation. We got piled on with the baggage and bondage of manipulation and lies from the Boomers who climbed the social ladder and then pulled it up behind them, and their Gen-X toadies who rode their coattails half way up hoping they wouldn't get noticed and shaken off to land back down here in the dirt with the rest of us.

And the thing that sets the Zoomers apart is that you witnessed this happening, every single crucial step of the betrayal from every authority figure from the president on down to the homeroom teacher, and by gods... You Learned.

Zoomers, in my view, seem to possess a preternatural hyper-awareness that any promise made by anyone who has something they can take from you is good for nothing. Some people say "Zoomers don't give a shit" like it's supposed to be an insult. HA. No. I see what's really happening. They're jealous. Giving a shit was a mistake. It was a mistake we Doomers made. And I am pleased, if not in awe, when I see Zoomers not falling for the bait. You have largely withdrawn yourselves from the rat race, and now it's running out of rats. Maybe now those fucking rats can finally starve holed up and isolated in their mazes. You, meanwhile, may very well build a better way to live. And whether or not I get to participate, I love to see it.

Go get 'em, Zoomers.

GEN X. The best gen.

We were nihilists long before the internet proved us right.

Plus we gave you grunge. You're welcome.

The electrochemical kind

Gen X. Aka: The feral generation. We were left to our own devices and most of us turned out fine.

Now get offa muh lawn! shakes fist

Gen X. The generation that couldn't be arsed to programme the video recorder or cooker digital time-clock, but knew how to.

There were a lot of power cuts in our (UK) youth and we remember saying to ourselves, "Ok, so that's how it's gonna be, huh?!". Still kicking arse and taking names.

We were the grown-up's TV remote control, with our 1200 bits per second magnetic tape storage for BBC B home computers (from the later ARM boys), before we got 360kB 5" floppy disks.

Tech doesn't phase us (yet); AI is a better average conversation than a spouse.

Semi-related anecdote…

During the debates my wife made a joke that Biden is so old he’s not even a Boomer. We then gave each other a look and pulled out our phones to check. Turns out it’s true, he is from the “Silent Generation”.

Gen Z. For once we are a minority on a social media platform that isn't facebook lol

Lost.

Any "gap" between generations falls into the Lost category.

Gen X

I'd be cautious that behavior, common experienced events, technology shifts, etc define categories and not the other way around. If the boundaries for generations are arbitrary then inclusion is just as arbitrary and not defined by behavior since behaviors can spread across multiple labels. We all want to belong, but tribalism can be a useful tool to divide humanity against itself. Historic generation labels where distinct boundaries can be observed and defined in an historic context makes sense to me, contemporary generational labels seem like divisive nonsense to me.

Elder millennial here

No clue. Everyone called me a millennial until they started calling me gen Z.

Generation X here.

Gen-Z here, born in the 00s.